A new GE report entitled “The Industrial Internet@Work” argues that organizations can save billions of dollars annually by eliminating deficiencies in how they gather, store and share machine data. Co-authors Marco Annunziata and Peter Evans, the company’s chief economist and director of global strategy and analytics, respectively, say that making information more consumable in “just a handful of industries” could save 300 million man-hours per year, the equivalent of $20 billion.

Annunziata and Evans write that the Industrial Internet will provide workers with “access to relevant information, relying on analytics generating new insights, [and] mobile collaboration tools revolutionizing the way that information is shared and disseminated.” They believe that “machines will play an active part in this; connected and communicative machines will be able to self-monitor, self-heal, and proactively send information to other machines and to their human partners.”

GE envisions an automated, data-driven future in which machines won’t replace humans, but rather help them take advantage of new technologies to become more productive. The company is pouring billions of dollars into analytics to turn this vision into a reality through what it calls the Industrial Internet, the concept of utilizing networked machinery to drive tangible business value.

In a move to position itself at the forefront of the Industrial Internet revolution, GE teamed up with major technology vendors to develop new cloud, analytics and service offerings for companies across a wide range of verticals. Central to the firm’s plans is its alliance with Pivotal, a joint venture between VMware and EMC in which it invested $105 million back in April.

GE also partnered with Amazon to deliver a cloud-based Big Data platform that can cost-effectively accommodate industrial applications.